“I am sure, master,” said Fingal, “I would soon make short work with one or two of them.”
“No,” said Claude, holding up a warning finger; “you must never attempt to molest them, Fingal; you will come to love them yet.”
“I don’t believe that,” Fingal seemed to reply.
The dogs were taken on shore at once, and though the Icebear was anchored some little distance from the land, giving her plenty of room to swing round, the row these animals made the first night seemed unearthly. The men could not sleep, and roundly rated the new-comers. Had the noise been a continuous one it would not have been so bad, but it was not so. The deep, deep silence of the Arctic regions would be allowed to remain unbroken for, say, the space of fifteen minutes, then all at once such a chorus of barking, howling, and screaming arose as only the pen of a Dante could describe adequately. This would continue for five minutes, mingled with the cracking of the keepers’ whips and their wild shouting, then gradually the unearthly Babel of sounds would die away, the men and officers on board would give sighs of relief and go to sleep once more, only to be disturbed again in the same fashion ere slumber had well sealed their eyelids.
“Frightful!” said Claude, next morning, at the breakfast-table; “I’ll put a stop to it.”
“You’ll be very clever if you do,” said the surgeon.
“Don’t go meddling near them with a whip, captain,” Lloyd remarked. “Poor Sanderson of ours got drunk one night, and went on shore with a rope’s end to settle, as he thought, a rumpus like what those beggars made last night. He was never seen again.”
“They killed him?”
“Yes, sir, and ate him afterwards, every bone of him. We never found a vestige of him, except the soles of his sea-boots, and we couldn’t bury those in a Christian way, you know, so we were saved the trouble of a funeral.”
“Call the carpenter, steward,” cried Claude. “Carpenter Jones,” he continued, when that worthy appeared, “build comfortable kennels for those dogs half a mile from the spot where our shore quarters are going to stand.”